Sometimes one of us would say something absurdly ordinary—“Do you think he’s cold?” or “The blanket looks too tight”—because if we didn’t occasionally touch normal life, the fear might take the whole room.
At around midnight, Daniel stood by the sink in the tiny family alcove and whispered, “I should have told you about the nanny.”
I looked up.
He didn’t turn around.
“I knew you’d have opinions,” he said. “Megan was embarrassed. I told her we didn’t need one. Then I was at work all day and she was calling me crying because she hadn’t slept for more than ninety minutes at a stretch and the baby wouldn’t latch and I kept thinking I was helping by saying we’d figure it out.” He scrubbed a hand down his face. “We figured it out like idiots.”
I got up and went to stand beside him.
“Needing help wasn’t the mistake,” I said quietly.
He looked at the paper cup in his hand. “Doesn’t feel that way.”
“No. It feels like trusting the wrong configuration of help.”
He gave a small, bitter laugh at that. “Always the engineer.”
I almost smiled.
Always the accountant, I thought, translating emotion into solvable structures.
